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Psalm 90:1-6,10, 12-17: Numbering Our Days – Day1 series: Faith and Science, part 7
“Teach us to number our days,” prays the psalmist, “that we may gain a wise heart.” But what does it mean “to number our days”? A good friend of mine has recently been reading the New York Times bestselling book called Being Mortal. The author of this book is a surgeon and a professor at…
Genesis 1:26-27: The Image of God and the Secret Life – Day1 series: Faith and Science, part 5
Last summer I was in Cambridge, England, for a conference. I had a free afternoon and I set out to find the Eagle Pub. The Eagle is just a short walk from the Old Cavendish Laboratory–the laboratory where some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in the 20th Century have taken place. Breakthroughs in physics, chemistry,…
Psalm 8:1-9: God and Cosmos – Day1 series: Faith and Science, part 2
Imagine that you’re lying on a beach. You’re lying on your back and your eyes sweep upward. What do you see? The mighty luminescence of the sun. A few cloud tufts wisping in the breeze. And then you look beyond. You strain your eyes as your vision sinks into the distance, the impenetrable distance that…
Genesis 18:1-15, (21:1-7)
Proper 6A
(Commentator’s Note: A lot happens between Genesis 12 and Genesis 21 but we only have 1 Sunday in the Lectionary to tell the whole story. This commentary intends to tell the whole story, with stops in Genesis 18 and 21. Pastoral Need God’s Word has plenty to say about waiting. The letters of Paul and…
Psalm 100
Proper 6A
Recently when the Lectionary featured Psalm 23 as the Year A lection, I took note of the fact that for all its fame as a psalm, the 23rd psalm is actually very short, quite compact. This week we are led to Psalm 100 and it also is among the better-known songs in the Hebrew Psalter. …
Matthew 9:35-10:8 (9-23)
Proper 6A
Our passage this week begins with Jesus feeling significant compassion for the crowds surrounding him. He was meeting a lot of them, going with his disciples from city to village and at every turn he encounters need after need. Matthew describes him as continuously proclaiming the good news and curing every disease and every sickness:…
Psalm 50:7-15
Proper 5A
The Lectionary has carved out the exact middle section of Psalm 50 for this Ordinary Time Sunday in Year A. It would have us skip the first half-dozen verses that summon Israel to gather before God and then the final verses that are all about a scolding of the wicked. Instead we focus on God’s…
Genesis 12:1-9
Proper 5A
Sacrifice We ordinarily approach this text as a promise, the start of God’s covenant with Israel. It is not a promise without sharp edges and a demand for sacrifice, even. Jewish scholar, Rashi, notes this with careful comparison between this text (Genesis 12) and a later, obviously sacrificial text (Genesis 22). In Genesis 22, it…
Psalm 8
Trinity Sunday A
Probably we don’t know enough about angels to know exactly what it means for the psalmist to suggest that we human being have been made “a little lower” than the angels. We have the sense in Scripture that angels are powerful in their own way. They do the will of God. They are messengers for…
Genesis 1:1-2:4a
Trinity Sunday A
Pastoral Need In Sunday school, you’d be invited to make a little booklet with one page for each day, a drawing of dark and light, earth and sky, dry land and seas, sun and moon, etc. And that’s how God made the whole thing — out of nothing — one day at a time. In…
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